This chapter is from the book

The sample presentation and all other files you need to work with can be found on the CD in the Makeover 07 folder.

You will learn how to:

Apply a Clean Theme

Promote Bullets to Slide Titles

Change the Slide Layout

Make Do with Fewer Words

Add Visuals

Play with Text Formatting

About This Makeover

For this makeover, I used an award-winning presentation created by the team of Scott Schwertly and Cheree Moore at Ethos3 Communications (www.ethos3.com). I wish to thank them for allowing me to use their presentation.

Unlike in other makeovers in this book, this presentation is a concept makeover rather than a new-features-in-PowerPoint makeover.

This presentation uses no bullets, and often uses pictures instead of words to create "concept slides." A picture of a cup of coffee represents coffee much better than just the word "coffee" because so much more is visible in a picture: There's the cup, the froth in the coffee, and the color of the coffee itself. Thus pictures engage the audience—people can form their own stories, and they will pay more attention to the presentation because they are more involved this way.

The way you present your message can be more important than the message itself. This is especially true if you want to use PowerPoint to illustrate a concept rather than just show some numbers. True, this no-bullets style of presentation might not be suitable (or even possible) all the time, but if you used this style all the time, it might not be as effective. Thus, the secret is to use this style in the opening or closing slides of a conventional presentation, and when the situation permits, you also can use it in an entire presentation, as we did in this makeover.

Remember that this presentation style does not reduce the number of slides you'll have to make—every slide that includes a title and four bullet points now must be changed to five slides: one for the title and one concept slide for each individual bullet!

Figure 8.1 shows you the "before" sample slides. Although the text looks crisp and clear, the presentation itself lacks life because it tries to tell a story using just a few words. The words that are used get lost because there are so many of them on a single slide, and I haven't even come to the visuals yet.

Figure 8.1 These were created using one of the built-in design themes contained in PowerPoint 2007.

To see how much difference a few words and visuals can make, go no further than Figure 8.2. This is the same content presented in slides that build on each other using a story sequence style.